Impact forces may be imparted to people, animals, or objects in a variety of environments or circumstances. For example, in sports activities, in military operations, in law enforcement duties, and even with patients before, during, or after medical procedures, impact forces may be imparted to an individual. Such forces, if large or severe enough, could result in injury or trauma to the individual, for example to muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems and internal organs.
Wearable protective gear is traditionally manufactured to protect the wearer from such impact forces. Exemplary wearers include athletes, police officers, and military personnel. Currently available protective gear typically consists of a synthetic fiber with high tensile strength and armor plating. This gear, however, is typically hot, heavy, uncomfortable, and costly, making it often impractical for use by workers in hazardous environments such as construction and firefighting or by consumers for personal protection at work, home, school, or public places. Existing systems often claim to transmit a portion of axial impact forces in a lateral or tangential direction, but the majority of the impact force is still propelled in the axial direction and is eventually transferred to the body or object being protected. Rigid plate protection distributes impact forces over the cross-section of the rigid plate, but forces are still axially transmitted to the object under protection and the distributed load is a factor of the surface area of the rigid plate. This limits the degree to which the force can be distributed and makes protecting small objects impractical or cost-prohibitive. The synthetic fibers which connect the rigid plates also do not form a continuous closed system which prevents the forces from being transmitted along a tangential axis between plates. Existing protective gear further lacks mechanisms to determine if the integrity of the protection system has been compromised, and are often unable to expand or contract to protect objects of various sizes and shapes.
Current design trends in protective equipment include incorporating gel technology to further dissipate impact energy peripherally (i.e., tangentially to the object being protected) as opposed to axially (i.e., toward the body or object being protected). However, gel systems still fail to practically minimize the axial force of a large impact. Rather, gel systems offer a force profile that includes a spike at the point of impact with an asymptotic peripheral decay away from the point of impact. At and around the impact point, gel systems can still transmit a considerable force through to the body. Accordingly, a need exists for protective equipment which further reduces axial forces resulting from impact.
Often times, the effect of an impact force on an individual is not fully recognized or known because of the event in which the force is imparted, or simply because the injury or trauma does not immediately manifest into an observable effect. Although there has been a known need to minimize impact forces that may be transmitted to or imparted to an individual's body (including the head) to reduce, among other injuries, brain trauma, current technology does not provide effective means for monitoring, measuring or protecting an individual without severely restricting motion or comfort. Moreover, current devices and systems do not provide for an ability to measure or monitor impact forces, or to analyze such data in real-time and provide an alert to a remote device should the analyzed data show that an alert condition has occurred. Accordingly, a need also exists for methods, systems, and devices that measure and monitor impact forces imparted to individuals, and for protecting individuals from impact forces.